Under a grand

Image 1 of 2

Image 1 of 2

Serena Davies

12:01AM GMT 12 Dec 2006

Want to buy a work of art for less that £1,000? Serena Davies shows you how.

The illustrator Ernest Howard Shepard's name is synonymous with one character, Winnie the Pooh. And a picture with Pooh's paw prints on it these days fetches a high price: several thousand for an original line drawing.

But not so the rest of E H Shepard's prodigious output. A A Milne's books represented just a small proportion of the 85 publications the artist, who also drew regularly for Punch, illustrated during his long life (1879-1976), and 300 of his images are now on sale at The Fine Art Society, most for under £1,000.

Take this sleepy hedgehog, for instance, an unmistakable Shepard, with more than a whiff of The Wind in the Willows' Badger about him as he hugs that old dressing gown to himself, cord trailing (Shepard also illustrated Kenneth Grahame's classic).

This is part of a series, well represented in the show, done for a 1960s anthology of children's poetry (now out of print), The Flattered Flying Fish, and comes in at £750, framed.

Sally Hunter, curator of the exhibition, describes the market for such enchanting little pen and ink pictures as strong. They come up now and then at auction, but an exhibition of this number is exceptional.

"Shepard drew beautifully," she adds. "He really hitched his wagon to black and white drawing, and he did it all his very long life. He drew everything from life [including this hedgehog], so all his work has such a feeling for accuracy and is very vivid. People remember it."